


The Living Joke

by GalahadWilder



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: White Knight, Nightwing (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws, The Joker - Fandom, Titans (Comics), birds of prey - Fandom
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationship, F/F, F/M, Implied abuse, M/M, Past Abuse, past abuse only, past abusive relationship, tw abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-26 22:35:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18726217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalahadWilder/pseuds/GalahadWilder
Summary: Harley has discovered a cure for the Joker’s broken mind, and now a mostly sane Jack Napier must come to grips with all of the harm he’s done over the years, and decide whether he’s damned for the actions of a madman wearing his face.A Batman: White Knight AU where PoisonQuinn is a thing, Batman is still the good guy, the Joker was a terrorist, and Jack isn’t quite so underhanded.





	1. Chapter 1

It is a quiet afternoon in the Burnley District when the formerly most dangerous couple in Gotham find themselves sitting across from each other in a cafe. They are no longer a couple, and as of last week, neither of them is the most dangerous person in the city, though they are both still somewhat unstable, somewhat dangerous. A sufficiently perceptive outside observer—the billionaire in the corner, watching them from behind sunglasses and a particularly convincing fake mustache, perhaps—would be able to tell that neither one of them seems to entirely want to be here, to be looking at each other. She resents him, she resents his presence in her life, and he knows. He has invited her here nonetheless.

”How long did it take you?” Jack says, softly. He remembers, vaguely, the loudness of his other voice, the mania that would take him before he struck her or shot or stabbed or melted someone. He keeps his voice level. He doesn’t want to scare anyone, her least of all. Even if he knows she could beat him to death with little effort, she is still terrified of him.

Harley, too, remembers the lilting, looping sound of the voice before her, and it’s _his_ voice, but somehow calm and steady and strange, and coming from a man impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, impeccably groomed, instead of dirty and disheveled as he’d once been. His face bears no trace of the white. “A few months,” she says. “Pam helped.”

”I don’t remember her very well,” Jack says, rolling his empty mug between his hands. The handle hits his fingers back and forth, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. “I didn’t like her very much, which I guess means she was better for you.” He looks up. “How is she? Still trying to end humanity?”

”She’s... better,” Harley says, blowing on her coffee. She’s dressed like she’s on break from a day at the psychiatrist’s office, a proper professional woman in a black pencil skirt, though the bright red of her blouse does detract from that a bit. She’s wearing large glasses, partly because it’s easier to see and partly because it helps hide her face. “She ain’t happy about me seeing you.”

”Hrm,” Jack says, placing his empty coffee mug on the table. He doesn’t know how caffeine will mix with his new medication, doesn’t want to try it yet in case something goes terribly wrong. “I wouldn’t be either.” He chuckles, then cuts himself off when he sees Harley flinch. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s difficult to remember not to laugh.”

“Pretty rough for someone who used ta be a comedian,” Harley says. She sees how he collapses a bit at her words, at ‘used to,’ but she can’t entirely bring herself to care. “Wouldn’t’ve expected you to talk all proper like this neither.”

“I’m consciously controlling my speech patterns,” he replies, staring at his cup. _Gotham Knights Champions!_ it proclaims, premade merchandise for a championship title that they did not actually win and got sold to various shops around the city at a massive markdown. “Joe hurt a lot of people in this town, and, well...” He sighs. “He may not have listened to you very much, but I picked up enough to know how triggers work.”

Joe. It’s a convenient fiction for them, that someone else poisoned the Gotham Reservoir, that someone else shot the Commissioner’s wife, that someone else beat Robin to death. Like most fictions, it’s a little bit true. But Jack still remembers some of the worst of it. The things the Joker enjoyed the most, the memories he lovingly reviewed when he was bored. Horrors he can’t shake from his mind.

Harley sighs. “Why’d ya ask me here, Jay?”

”I wanted to know why,” he says. “Why you looked for a cure, why you didn’t just kill me.”

”How’d you know it was me?” she says, hiding her smile behind her coffee mug. Perverse as it is, this is the most appreciation she’s ever gotten from the man she once loved, and damned if it doesn’t satisfy her at least a little.

”A neurologist, psychologist, and chemist who knows me well enough to be able to guess what’s wrong with my brain despite my constantly changing mental state?” Jack says with a smile of his own that he immediately fights down. “It was either you or Batman, and given that the first dose was sprayed from a flower...”

”Your signature,” Harley murmurs.

”Ivy was my first thought, actually,” he says, turning the mug on the table. “It can’t have been easy to convince her to synthesize. I know it wasn’t for me, and I doubt she’d have accepted it for you. So why?”

Harley sighs. “Joe and I...” she begins, then places her mug back on the table. Her eyes grow wet, and she wipes them with the backs of her hands despite the easily available napkins. “We had a daughter.”

Jack’s breath comes short and his eyes widen. “I’m... I’m a father?”

Harley nods. “Her name is Lucy,” she says. “I’m not gonna tell you where she lives in case... _he_ comes back, but I needed to test the meds. I... didn’t want her to...”

”To turn out like me,” Jack finishes, breathless. He takes no offense at the implication. _He_ wouldn’t want his child to end up like Joe either.

Harley nods. “Didn’t know if your condition was hereditary.”

He’s still shellshocked. He lost his first chance at fatherhood three hours before he fell into that vat, when the men shot his pregnant wife just to scare him into complying. To get another one, now, after all he’s done...

”I’d love to meet her, someday,” he finds himself saying. “If you ever decide it’s safe.”

She grimaces. “Might be a while.”

He nods. “That’s fine.” He stands up from the table, reaching for his hat before remembering that he doesn’t wear one— _Joe_ wore one, and Jack burned it. Or at least he thinks he did. Some things on the new medication are still hazy. “Thank you for meeting me,” he says. “I know it must’ve been hard.”

”You have _no_ idea,” Harley responds, picking up her mug again.

”Give my thanks to Pam,” Jack says as he gathers up his coat. “For... being there for you when I wasn’t.” He doesn’t wait for a reply, because he’s feeling urges now, urges to laugh and kill and burn and he needs to get out and get another dose, he needs to stabilize before he doesn’t want to anymore. But he takes a moment on the way out to stop next to the table of the man in the sunglasses.

”That mustache must itch like hell,” he says, nonchalant. Not really looking at the man.

”Pretty rich comin’ from a stiff who once wore ‘is own face as a mask,” the man fires back, chewing on a toothpick the whole time.

The side of Jack’s mouth quirks upwards, and if it wouldn’t have terrified everyone in the cafe, he’d have burst out laughing. The accent is ridiculous, but Jack supposes that might just be because he knows what the man’s voice is supposed to sound like. And his observational joke _is_ pretty clever. “Who knew you had a sense of humor?”

“Pretty much everyone but you,” the man says. His mouth doesn’t change, but there’s a crinkling at the corners of his eyes that suggests a smile.

Jack nods, then makes his way out of the cafe with no one else the wiser.


	2. Chapter 2

One hundred feet below Wayne Manor, elevator doors open into a vast cavern and a dead man steps out. Jason Todd, the Red Hood, the black sheep of the Bat Family, Titan and Outlaw, enters the Batcave carrying his cycling helmet under his arm and wondering why Bruce has invited him here. Especially in the middle of the day.

"Chemical analysis looks hopeful," he hears Bruce say. "The formula seems to be doing exactly what Harley predicted it would."

" _Seems_ to?" Dick replies. "Didn't you say yourself he was acting like a normal person in the café?"

"He's very good at that," Bruce responds as Jason rounds the corner and sees Bruce in chinos and a button-down sitting at the Batcomputer, looking over analysis of what Jason recognizes vaguely as a variety of antipsychotic, though not one he's ever seen before. Dick, meanwhile, is perched on one of the railings and dressed like a well-groomed hobo. "He fooled me for months as Eric Border," Bruce continues. "I'm not exactly objective here." He takes a sip of his coffee from a _#1 Mom_ mug that Tim and Cass had found at a flea market and had rapidly become his favorite. "Good morning, Jason," he says, without turning around.

"Hey, B," Jason says, unsurprised that Batman has noticed he's here. He places his helmet down on an empty stainless steel table. "Doesn't sound like I'm in trouble for anything?"

"You're not," Bruce says, typing a long string of nonsense symbols, or rather, a code designed by Clark to be easily readable at super-speed. In the corner, the computer states that the file is being shared with  _SciencePizza—_ Barry's username on the Justice League groupchat. "I need your perspective on something." He glances at Dick. "Both of yours."

"Sure, whatcha got?" Jason says, dropping into one of the spare chairs and spinning a few times.

Bruce gestures to the screen. "What do you think of this?"

Jason tilts his head. "Looks like a new kind of anti-psychotic," he says. "Organic ingredients, some novel stuff..." He looks at Bruce. "This for Harvey?"

Dick shudders. "God, I hope not."

"Be nice, Dick," Barbara says, coming up the stairs with Cassandra trailing quietly behind her. Barbara is wearing jeans and a leather jacket, while Cass is dressed in jeans, a messy white blouse, and a black skinny tie. "Harvey's an old friend."

"He _shot_ me in the _face_ ," Dick pouts back.

"Poor baby," Barbara responds, caressing her boyfriend's cheek. "Always a shame when something happens to a face that pretty."

Cass walks over to her father's side, leaning onto the back of the chair with crossed arms. "Your call seemed urgent."

"Somewhat." Bruce looks up at her, naked fondness in his eyes. "Cassandra, darling, can you move? I need to turn around."

Cassandra moves over slightly, turns, and leans against the keyboard, and Jason is somewhat jealous to note that she's perfected the "bisexual slouch" that Jason has been trying to practice on Roy and Artemis for months. And given that it's  _Cass,_ she probably knows exactly what she's communicating, though given that Tim and Stephanie are in California Jason isn't exactly sure who she's communicating  _to_.

Bruce turns the chair around, so Cass is behind him and the rest of his present children in his field of vision. "I've called the four of you here because each of you has a unique perspective on a particular issue," he says. "We have reason to believe that Harley Quinn has managed to create an effective treatment for the Joker's mental condition."

There's a moment of absolute stunned silence that echoes through the entire cave, then Barbara breaks it with a hearty "Holy shit."

Dick whistles.

Jason crosses his arms behind his head. "So what's the plan to get him to take it?" he says. "Force it down his throat?"

Bruce shakes his head. "I already had Aaron Cash deliver him the first dose," he says. "And from what Barry, Harley, and I can all tell, it seems to be working. But."

"But," Cassandra echoes knowingly. She nods. "You're not sure."

Bruce purses his lips. "I want it to work," he says. "But at the same time, the pessimist in me is hoping that it won't. Punching him is simpler. So it's..." He tilts his head. "...difficult." He looks at his three oldest partners. "You three have the most experience with him out of anyone in the family, and Cassandra—" he acknowledges her with a nod of his head, "—is the best equipped to notice smaller signs. I'd like to ask you four to watch him, to gauge whether he actually  _is_ getting better or whether it's some kind of ruse."

Jason grimaces, leaning forward. "You know I'm going to default to no."

Bruce sucks in his lips and nods. "That's why I asked your advice specifically," he says. "You and Barbara are the least likely people in the family to trust him." He does not say why, because everyone in the room knows and he of all people knows what it's like to have to relive significant trauma. "If he  _is_ faking, I'm counting on you two to find out why."

It's an odd experience, being needed by Bruce for possibly the first time since he died. Jason decides he likes it.

"I kinda feel like the odd man out, here," Dick says.

Bruce turns to him. "You're the most likely to believe him," he says, and it's not an accusation—there's pride in his voice as he says it. "If it is, then Jack is going to need—"

"Jack?" Barbara interrupts.

"Jack Napier," Bruce says. "It's his name."

Cassandra raises an eyebrow. "First-name basis?"

Bruce remains completely impassive, which for him means he’s basically rolling his eyes. "If this is real, then  _Napier_ is going to need someone in his corner to make sure he doesn't backslide."

"I have a condition," Barbara announces. Everyone turns to her, and she clutches at her elbow, nervously shifting her weight to one hip. "I'm not going  _near_ him," she says. "I'll do it, but only as Oracle. No Batgirl involved."

Jason's eyes unconsciously flick to her stomach, where the bullet scar is hiding among a small number of larger knife wounds, then he catches himself and looks away. He feels a twinge on his back, the one he feels whenever he gets cold, where the Lazarus pit never quite erased the scarring from the crowbar. He can sympathize with not wanting to share space with that monster. It's a big part of why he started carrying guns, and why he decided to wear the red helmet—his own twisted form of exposure therapy.

"Agreed," Bruce says, turning back to his computer. "Now, if you'll excuse me, Croc's been robbing bodegas again." He glances at Jason. "You've got a fairly good relationship with him. Care to come with?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone is wondering why Bruce seems out of character, I'm using Unpretty's Bruce from the Sorrowful and Immaculate Hearts series—specifically taking inspiration from the fic "Christmas in Kansas"—who I think is the best Batman/Bruce Wayne ever written. You can find that fic (and the series in general) here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6663184/chapters/15238855


End file.
